


Here for The Cookies

by hbxplain



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Episode: s02e11 Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas, Gen, Pierce-Centric, everyone else is mentioned but not really important to the story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:01:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29769684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hbxplain/pseuds/hbxplain
Summary: Sometimes Pierce is too prideful to admit it. But in the end, he's glad the study group are his friends. Even Abed.(In which we see Pierce's thought process throughout the claymation episode and explore the beginning of the character arc that he was robbed of.)
Relationships: Pierce Hawthorne & Abed Nadir
Comments: 7
Kudos: 13





	Here for The Cookies

**Author's Note:**

> can't believe the first community fic i've ever written is for PIERCE. but look ok he was ROBBED. yes he was a horrible terrible person but goddammit he was improving!! there were episodes (like this one, among others--the videogame inheritance one comes to mind) where he was very clearly making progress with himself and with the group.
> 
> and then later on in the series You-Know-What happens and i just. he and abed's friendship deserved to be explored more. i'm not saying it was good, or could have EVER been good... but come on. i think we were owed a little more than THAT.
> 
> so here we are!

Pierce is only here for the cookies.

Because they said there’d be cookies. And Christmas, for Pierce, is not at all about bad British shrinks or delusion Muslim kids. But cookies, he can do.

In all honesty, Pierce doesn’t pay all that much attention to… well, anything. He munches on the cookies and zones out wondering, for the hundredth time, if buying a breath-controlled wheelchair instead of a normal one was a bad idea after all. He only tunes back in to the whole ordeal when Duncan starts throwing a fit about his daddy issues, or something else Pierce cares equally little about. The shrink—did Abed call him a _wizard?_ Woof. The wizard stomps out of the room after being forced to face his own emotions, and Pierce snickers as he slams the study room door. Pretentious idiot. If Abed wanted a shrink, he’d _get_ one. The kid knows perfectly well how to get what he wants. It’s the one thing about him that Pierce kind of understands.

Speaking of the kid—he’s giving some sort of speech, now. “I can’t have anyone going beyond this point that’s on his side,” Abed finishes, and Pierce realizes that Jeff and Shirley have actually left the room. Hmph. Not fair. But if all Abed wants is to weed out the high-and-mighty dumbasses who think Duncan has even an ounce of competence in his field, then Pierce supposes he can go along for the ride.

“Like I said, I came for the cookies,” Pierce says, shrugging carelessly and reaching for another. He wonders, briefly, if his claymation self is holding claymation cookies, but then he full-body shudders at the realization that he’s been spending far too much time around these college nutjobs.

Britta gets kicked out of the room, apparently. Abed’s singing about it for some reason.

“Damn. It got real up in that memory cave,” Troy says.

“I know, right!?” Annie pipes up. Pierce can’t tell if it’s genuine, or if she’s just agreeing with Troy to be a whore. Meh. What does Pierce care anyway?

“Speaking of real,” Pierce pipes up, deciding he’s tired of this whole thing, “this has been great. But the cookies are gone, and I have to take a giant leak.” He blows himself out of the room, ignoring Abed pointing out various politically correct religious landmarks. By the time Pierce reaches the bathroom, his thoughts are far too quiet. Shouldn’t Greendale be a little louder right now? The hallways are desolate, their only touches of life coming from the dean’s excess of winter decor. Pierce almost misses listening to the crackhead claymation story.

In fact… He _does_ miss it. Maybe it’s stupid, and a little bit pathetic, but he’s pretty proud of himself for outlasting _Britta_ in that impromptu therapy session. That makes him a good friend, right?

(Pierce hates to acknowledge it in any form, private or otherwise, but the fact remains that Pierce has had very few real friends in his life. He’s had suck-ups wanting a piece of his money, and he’s had wives aiming desperately for the same thing, and he enjoyed those relationships. Really, he did! He got praise and adoration out of some of them, and sex out of others. But the study group are the only friends he can ever remember having that seem to really, truly care about him. And a part of him hates it, but he cares about them, too.)

Aw, who is he kidding? His house is empty around these times. And around every other time. The only person who might be there is Troy, and Troy is back in the study room anyhow. Pierce is really just delaying the inevitable at this point, clinging tight to a pride that no one else acknowledges anyway.

He goes back to the study room.

“Oof!” Pierce says as he wheels himself back over to the table. He aims for casual, hoping that no one will make a big deal out of it. It helps that hardly anyone is still in the room to begin with. “All right, where are we? Christmas train?”

Abed looks at him, tilting his head in that strange, curious way of his. And while Pierce would never call the kid’s eyes anything as gay as “gentle and mysterious,” he’s willing to admit, in this moment, that they have a certain earnestness to them. Abed isn’t looking to make fun of him for returning. He only wants to understand.

“I didn’t wanna go home,” Pierce admits, confident in the relatively loneliness of the room. “It’s depressing there this time of year.”

Abed looks at him a little longer. And then his face breaks into a tiny smile, tentative and grateful and indicative of most emotion Pierce has ever seen from the kid. Pierce smiles back. Just barely.

Abed is quiet for a while, almost catatonic with his hands folded against each other on the study room table. Pierce watches him just as quietly, unwilling to break the trance he’s gotten himself into. Just as unwillingly, he finds himself wondering what Abed’s seeing right now. Some kind of weird, egotistical planet? Something to do with snow, and cartoon-like Christmas destinations? After a while, Abed furrows his eyebrows a little, and Pierce speaks up. “What are we looking at?”

“Santa’s workshop, Abed says. His voice is grave.

“Okay,” Pierce says after a few awkward, quiet moments wherein Abed is probably doing something absurd in his head. “So, meaning of Christmas, right?” He doesn’t hesitate to play along this time; he’s happy to do it, really. He’s the only one who’s stuck it out long enough to see Abed’s journey to the end, and that hint of pride in his chest surges even taller than it was before. “You see it?”

Abed shakes his head, looking slightly at a loss for words. Pierce wonders if he hasn’t run out of ideas for his story yet.

“Well,” Pierce offers, “can’t it just be anywhere?” He doesn’t see why it has to be complicated. They’ve already exiled most the study group; isn’t that complicated enough? “Like, there?”

Pierce points to a random spot in the study room. Abed follows his finger and then pauses and then nods resolutely. “Good job, Pierce.”

Huh. Well, what do you know.

“It’s the first season of _Lost_ on DVD,” Abed says after a moment. It sounds lackluster.

_“That’s_ the meaning of Christmas?” Pierce asks. Jesus Christ, all this trouble for _that?_

“No,” Abed says sadly. “It’s a metaphor. It represents lack of payoff.”

“Correct,” Duncan says from way atop his high horse as he strides back into the room. He gives something like what Troy and Abed might call a villain monologue, and Pierce doesn’t really listen to all that much of it. He gets the gist; Abed’s mom has thrown him to the side. And Pierce tunes in just in time to hear Duncan say as much.

“There’s nothing left to do but heal,” Duncan says, smiling his plastic smile. “And share the experience with as many reputable journals as possible.”

Good lord. Even Pierce isn’t _that_ much of an ass. Most of the time. He glances at Abed out of the corner of his eye, and then turns his full attention in that direction when he realizes the kid isn’t so much as blinking. Pierce isn’t even all that confident that he’s _breathing;_ he snaps his fingers in front of Abed’s face and feels an unfamiliar, discomforting sense of worry wash over him. “Great,” he snaps to Duncan, “look what you did to the kid. What’s your article gonna be called? ‘Worst Shrink Ever?’”

“Hey, this is not my fault,” Duncan complains, slowly raising his voice. Abed still hasn’t moved. “This is what Christmas _does_ to people! We put too much meaning into it, and it lets us down.”

“We beg to differ,” Jeff says dramatically, and Pierce doesn’t know when the rest of the group got back, but he’s glad they did. He doesn’t think he’s equipped to deal with Abed on his own.

Jeff and the others give a fancy speech together, and it somehow resolves with them agreeing to _sing._ Annie says something about aiming ‘magic Christmas weapons’ at Duncan, and Pierce isn’t sure what he’s supposed to take away from that so he decides to stay on the safe side and just start pelting Duncan with anything within arm’s reach. Which is a lot, because Annie’s the only one of them who knows how to stay organized. Pierce adds in his own verse in the song when it begins to lull, and he resigns himself to being a mushy old geezer for a second or two, just for the sake of Christmas.

They chase Duncan out of the room, and after a few tense seconds of held breaths, Abed is still quiet. But then he blinks back to life, slowly adjusting himself to the world again, and he thanks them for being his friends, and Pierce almost thanks him back. But he doesn’t, and thank god, because that’s not something his reputation could just bounce back from.

They decide to spend Christmas together, with Abed, watching that movie he used to watch every year with his mom. They pull a quick heist, swiping a Christmas tree right out from under Duncan and the dean’s noses, and Pierce hides his smile when he catches Shirley running back to grab the menorah, too. They set it all up in Abed’s dorm, squish the top of the tree so it fits beneath the low ceilings, and then they all pile onto the couch or its immediate area and settle in for a movie.

And it’s… nice. Pierce knows he isn’t the best friend; he knows he’s not even a particularly good one, most of the time. And there’s a small, prideful part of him that wants to change exactly as much as he wanted to when he first met the group, which is to say: not at all. But there's a much _larger_ part that is infinitely grateful for the patience and love this group has shown him. There’s even a teeny tiny part that chides him when he says something offensive to someone in the group. (It sounds a little like Shirley.)

Pierce could lie to himself. He could cling to that stubborn little part of himself that insists he was better off alone, he could keep ramping up the racism and the impatience and the constant efforts at being a nuisance just for attention’s sake. But he loves these people, he thinks.

(And he knows, in his heart, that he wasn’t just there for the cookies.)


End file.
